Will Chestnut Trees Make a Comeback?

Due to a blight, American chestnuts are now rare in the Midwest. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

In the first half of the last century, there were millions of American chestnut trees ranging from the Eastern seaboard to the Upper Midwest. Now, there are virtually none… because a fungus killed them. A campaign is being launched to bring back a blight-resistant version of the chestnut… and it’s being planted here in the Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen
reports:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/05/cohen_052305.mp3

Transcript

In the first half of the last century, there were millions of
American chestnut trees ranging from the Eastern seaboard to the Upper
Midwest. Now, there are virtually none because a fungus killed them.
A campaign is being launched to bring back a blight-resistant version of
the chestnut, and it’s being planted here in the Midwest. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:

Sprouts from diseased chestnut trees don’t get the killer fungus until
they’re 4 inches tall, so researchers like Brian McCarthy of Ohio
University have had plenty of raw material to breed a new version of the
chestnut tree.

“Fifteen-sixteenths pure American chestnut and one-sixteenth Chinese
chestnut. And that one-sixteenth of the genome confers blight resistance.”

Ohio is now planting hundreds of the new seedlings on top of abandoned strip
mines. McCarthy believes they may help reclaim the land.

“It’s not that chestnuts like this kind of soil. It’s that probably that chestnuts can
tolerate this type of soil better than other broadleaf tree species can.”

McCarthy hopes that a century from now, the blight-resistant chestnut
trees will once again be prominent in forests, providing high-quality
lumber and food for wildlife.